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Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
labored spiritually for the conversion of England. The companion of
F. Parsons, as Pounde had been of F. Campion, he, too, was a
convert not only from courtly vanities, but from actual Calvinism.
Ardently desiring martyrdom, he nevertheless embraced obediently
and lovingly the cross of a "sluggish death in bed"; but at least the
pain of exile had been added to imprisonment, for he was banished
from his native land, and died at Rome in 1583. His whole substance
was offered to the service of God, and what little remained at his
death he left to the Society for the spiritual needs of his country. It
was not till he lay upon his death-bed that he pronounced his vows.
F. Darbyshire was as learned as he was zealous. While in France
preparing for his perilous English mission, he refused the honors of
the pulpit and the professorial chair, and confined himself to giving
catechetical instruction; but God so rewarded his humility that grave
scholars and theologians would flock to hear him, and make notes of
the wonderful learning he displayed, while they admired the
eloquence he could not hide. He and his friend, F. Henry Tichborne,
might well congratulate themselves, later on, on the holy efficacy of
persecution, which had caused the "confluence of the rares and
bestes wittes of our nation to the seminaries," and of the happy
increase in the number of fervent inmates of the foreign seminaries
They descant, too, on the unwise policy of persecution, and the fact
that no religion was ever permanently established by the sword. The
faith might have been reft of one of its greatest glories in England
had not a short-sighted fanaticism resorted to violent means to
uproot it. F. Darbyshire died in exile in France in 1604, in the very
same place, Pont-à-Mousson, where he had so signally distinguished
himself for learning and for modesty in the beginning of his
apostolate.
This book is written in simple, Saxon style. The author trusts rather
to facts than to rhetoric, just as of old the acts of the martyrs were
chronicled without much comment, whether descriptive or
panegyrical. The volume bears "First Series" on its title-page, as a
promise that it is but the prelude to other biographies as interesting.
Let us hope that the promise will be speedily fulfilled.
 The Life of the Blessed John Berchmans. By Francis Goldie,
S.J. (F. Coleridge's Quarterly Series, Vol. VII.) London:
Burns & Oates. 1873. (New York: Sold by The Catholic
Publication Society.)
At last we have in English a biography of this angelic imitator of S.
Aloysius, as charming as himself. The other lives we have seen are
edifying but tedious. This one is equally edifying, but as fascinating
as a romance, and published in an attractive style. It is specially
adapted for the reading of young people.
Lectures upon the Devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus
Christ. By the Very Rev. T. S. Preston, V.G. New York:
Robert Coddington. 1874.
We cannot do more than call attention to the publication of this
work, just issued as we go to press. It embraces stenographic
reports of four extempore lectures by the pastor of St. Ann's, New
York, upon a subject of special interest at this time. In an appendix
is given the pastoral of the archbishop and bishops, announcing the
consecration of all the dioceses of this province to the Most Sacred
Heart of Jesus; together with a Novena, from the French of L. J.
Hallez.
 THE
CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. XVIII., No. 108.—MARCH,
1874.[249]
 JOHN STUART MILL.[250]
In 1764, Hume met, at the house of Baron d'Holbach, a party of the
most celebrated Frenchmen of that day; and the Scotchman took
occasion to introduce a discussion concerning the existence of an
atheist, in the strict sense of the word; for his own part, he said, he
had never chanced to meet with one. "You have been unfortunate,"
replied Holbach; "but at the present moment you are sitting at table
with seventeen of them."
Whether or not the leading men among the positivists and cosmists
of England to-day are prepared to be as frank as the Baron
d'Holbach, we shall not venture to say; at all events, John Stuart
Mill, to whom they all looked up with the reverence of disciples for
the master, has taken care that the world should not remain in doubt
concerning his opinions on this subject, which, of all others, is of the
deepest interest to man. Among those who in this century have
labored most earnestly to propagate an atheistic philosophy, based
on the assumption that the human mind is incapable of knowing
aught beyond relations, he certainly holds a place of distinction, and,
as a representative of what is called scientific atheism, the history of
his opinions is worthy of serious attention.
It was known some time before his death that he had written an
autobiography; and when it was announced that his step-daughter,
Miss Taylor, whom he had made his literary executrix, was about to
publish the work, the attention of at least those who take interest in
the profounder controversies of the age was awakened.
As an autobiography, the book has but little merit; though this
should not be insisted on, since success in writing of this kind is
extremely rare. If it is almost as difficult in any case to write a life
well as to spend it well, when one attempts to become the historian
of his own life, there is every probability that he will either be
ridiculous or uninteresting. Mill, too, it must be conceded, had but
poor material at his command. His life was uneventful, uninviting
even, in its surroundings; and when the patchwork of his
philosophical opinions is taken away, there is little left in it that is not
wholly commonplace.
He was born in London, in 1806, and was the eldest son of James
Mill, who was a charity student of divinity at the University of
Edinburgh, but, becoming disgusted with the doctrines of
Presbyterianism, gave up all idea of studying for the ministry, and in
a short while renounced Christian faith, and became an avowed
atheist, though his atheism was negative; his belief in what is called
the relativity of knowledge not justifying him in affirming positively
that there is no God, but only in holding that the human mind can
never know whether there be a God or not. He, however, did not
stop here, but, scandalized by the suffering which is everywhere in
the world, forgot his own principles, and maintained that it is absurd
to suppose that such a world is the work of an infinitely perfect
being, and was rather inclined to accept the Manichean theory of a
good and evil principle, struggling against each other for the
government of the universe. But of God, as revealed in Christ, he
had a hatred as satanical as that of Voltaire.
"I have a hundred times heard him say," writes his son, "that all
ages and nations have represented their gods as wicked, in a
constantly increasing progression; that mankind have gone on,
adding trait after trait, till they reached the most perfect conception
of wickedness which the human mind can devise, and have called
this God, and prostrated themselves before it. This ne plus ultra of
wickedness he considered to be embodied in what is commonly
presented to mankind as the creed of Christianity."[251] In other
words—for Mill can mean nothing less—he held that the character of
Christ, as portrayed in the Gospel, is the highest possible conception
of all that is depraved and repulsive; that Christ, instead of being
incarnate God, is the essence of wickedness clothed in bodily form;
that, compared with him, or at least with the God whom he called
his father, Moloch, Astarte, Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Bacchus are
pure divinities; and from the manner in which the son narrates these
opinions of his father, he evidently desires that we should infer that
they are also his own.
The elder Mill, who seems to have been a natural pedagogue, took
the education of his son exclusively into his own hands, and was
most careful not to allow him to acquire any impressions contrary to
his own sentiments respecting religion. Instead of teaching him to
believe that God created the heavens and the earth, he taught him
to believe that we can know nothing whatever of the manner in
which the world came into existence, and that the question, "Who
made you?" is one which cannot be answered, since we possess no
authentic information on the subject.
To show, however, his father's conviction of the logical connection
between Protestantism and infidelity, he records that he taught him
to take the strongest interest in the Reformation, "as the great and
decisive contest against priestly tyranny for liberty of thought."
"I am thus," he adds, "one of the very few examples in this country
of one who has not thrown off religious belief, but never had it; I
grew up in a negative state with regard to it."[252]
How he could grow up in a negative condition with regard to religion
is not easily understood when we consider that his father instilled
into his mind from his earliest years the doctrine that the very
essence of religion is evil, since it is, and ever has been, worship
paid to the demon, the highest possible conception of wickedness;
though he was at the same time careful to impress upon him the
duty of concealing his belief on this subject; and this lesson of
parental prudence was, as the younger Mill himself informs us,
attended with some moral disadvantages.[253]
These moral disadvantages, in his own opinion at least, were
without positive influence upon his character, since through the
whole book there runs the tacit assumption of his own perfect
goodness. I am an atheist, he seems to say, and yet I am a saint;
and he is evidently persuaded that his own life is sufficient proof that
the notion that unbelief is generally connected with bad qualities
either of mind or heart is merely a vulgar prejudice.
"The world would be astonished," he informs us, "if it knew how
great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most
distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are
complete sceptics in religion.... But the best of them (unbelievers),
as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will
hesitate to affirm, are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of
the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves
the title."[254]
This is probably not more extravagant than the assertion that the
God of Christianity is the embodiment of all that is fiendish and
wicked.
We cannot, however, pass so lightly over this portion of Mill's book,
or dismiss without further examination the assumption that the best
are they who refuse to believe in God, and hold that man is merely
an animal.
The real controversy of the age, as thoughtful men have long since
recognized, is not between the church and the sects. Protestantism,
from the beginning, by asserting the supremacy of human reason,
denied the sovereignty of God, and in its postulates, at least, was
atheistic. Hence Catholic theologians have never had any difficulty in
showing that rebellion against the authority of the church is revolt
against that of Christ, which is apostasy from God. To this argument
there is really no reply, and the difficulties which Protestants have
sought to raise against the church are based upon a sophism which
underlies all non-Catholic thought.
The pseudo-reformers objected that the church could not be of
Christ, because in it there was evil; many of its members were
sinful; as the deists hold that the Bible is not the word of God,
because of the many seeming incongruities and imperfections which
are everywhere found in it; as the atheists teach that the universe
cannot be the work of an all-wise and omnipotent Being, since it is
filled with suffering and death; and that love cannot be creation's
final law, since nature, "red in tooth and claw with ravin," shrieks
against this creed.
If the imperfections and abuses in the practical workings of the
church are arguments against its divine institution and authority,
then undoubtedly the "measureless ill" which is in the world is
reason for doubting whether a Being infinitely good is its author.
Hence the traditional objections of Protestants to the church are, in
the ultimate analysis, reducible to the atheistic sophism, which,
because there is evil in the creature, seeks to conclude that the
creator cannot be wholly good; not perceiving that it would be as
reasonable to demand that the circle should be square as to ask that
the finite should be without defect.
The church is, both logically and historically, the only defensible
Christianity; as Jean Jacques Rousseau long ago admitted in the
well-known words: "Prove to me that in matters of religion I must
accept authority, and I will become a Catholic to-morrow." There is
no controversy to-day between the church and Protestantism which
is worthy of serious attention. All that is important has been said on
this subject, and Protestants themselves begin to understand that it
is far wiser for them to try to hold on to the shreds of Christian belief
which still remain to them than to waste their strength in attacks on
the church, which, as they are coming to recognize, is after all the
strongest bulwark of faith in the soul and in God.
The ground of debate to-day is back of heterodoxy and orthodoxy; it
lies around the central fact in all religion—God himself.
The scientific theories of the present time, if they do not deny the
existence of God, are at least based upon hypotheses which ignore
him and his action in the world; and the few attempts which have
been made to construct what may be called a philosophy of science
all proceed upon the assumption that, whether there be a God or
not, science cannot recognize his existence.
The faith which the elder Mill taught his son—that of the manner in
which the world came into existence nothing can be known—is that
which most scientists accept. The desire to organize society upon an
atheistic basis is also very manifest and very general.

"Reorganiser, sans Dieu ni roi

Par le culte systematique de l'Humanité."

The idealistic philosophy of Germany, invariably terminating in

pantheism, is another proof of the atheistic tendency of modern
thought.
Mill, in his Autobiography, has of course made no attempt to prove
that there is no God. On the contrary, as we have already stated, he
has admitted that this proposition cannot be proved; but he believes
there is no God, fails to perceive any evidence of design in the
universe, and, from a morbid sense of the evil which abounds, feels
justified in concluding that the cosmos is not the work of an infinitely
good and omnipotent Being.
Dr. Newman, in his Apologia, a work of the same character as the
Autobiography of Mill, but which will be read with delight when Mill
and his book will have been forgotten, has seen this difficulty, and
given expression to it in his own inimitable manner. "To consider the
world," he writes, "in its length and breadth, its various history, the
many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual
alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments,
forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their
random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of
long-standing facts; the tokens, so faint and broken, of a
superintending design; the blind evolution of what turn out to be
great powers or truths; the progress of things, as if from
unreasoning elements, not toward final causes; the greatness and
littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the
curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat
of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the
prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the
corruptions, the dreary, hopeless irreligion, that condition of the
whole race so fearfully yet exactly described in the apostle's words,
'having no hope, and without God in the world'—all this is a vision to
dizzy and appall, and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound
mystery which is absolutely beyond human solution."[255]
But, as Dr. Newman expresses it, ten thousand difficulties do not
make one doubt. Difficulty and doubt are incommensurate. When we
have sufficient reasons for accepting two seemingly contradictory
propositions, the fact that we are unable to reconcile them should
not be a motive for rejecting them. The human race has accepted, in
all time, the existence of God with an assent as real as that with
which it has believed in the substance that underlies the
phenomenon. To a countless number of minds, the difficulty to
which Mill has given such emphasis has presented itself with a force
not less than that with which it struck him.
Millions have approached the mystery of evil, and have asked
themselves

"Are God and nature, then, at strife,

That nature lends such evil dreams?"

But they have not weakly refused to believe in God because they
could not comprehend his works. They saw the evil; but the deepest
instincts of the soul—the longing for immortal life, the craving for
the unattainable, the thirst for a knowledge never given, the sense
of the emptiness of what seems most real; the mother-ideas of
human reason—those of being, of cause, of the absolute, the
infinite, the eternal, the sense of the all-beautiful, the all-perfect—
made them fall
 "Upon the great world's altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God,"

and stretch hands of faith, and trust the larger hope.

We do not propose to offer any arguments to prove that God is, or
to show that his existence is reconcilable with the evil in the world,
since Mill has not attempted to establish the contradictory of this;
but we wish merely to state that his apprehension of the difficulties
which surround this question is not keener than that of thousands of
others who have seen no connection between apprehending these
difficulties and doubting the doctrines to which they are attached.
Whilst admitting that science can never prove that there is no God,
Mill evidently intended his Autobiography to be an argument against
the usefulness of belief in God for moral and social purposes;
"which," he tells us, "of all the parts of the discussion concerning
religion, is the most important in this age, in which real belief in any
religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its
necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when
those who reject revelation very generally take refuge in an
optimistic deism—a worship of the order of nature and the supposed
course of Providence—at least as full of contradictions and
perverting to the moral sentiments as any of the forms of
Christianity, if only it is as fully realized."[256] Confessing the inability
of the scientists to prove that there is no God, he thinks that they
should devote their efforts to the attempt to show that belief in God
is not beneficial either to the individual or to society. We shall,
therefore, turn to the question of morality, which is enrooted in
metaphysics, out of which it grows, and to which it is indebted both
for its meaning and its strength.
Can the atheistic philosophy give to morality a solid basis? To deny
the existence of an infinitely perfect Being is to affirm that there is
no absolute goodness, no moral law, eternal, immutable, and
necessary, no act that in itself is either good or bad, no certain and
fixed standard of right and wrong.
Hence atheistic philosophy can give to morality no other foundation
than that of pleasure or utility:

"Atque ipsa utilitas justi prope mater et aequi,

Nec natura potest justo secernere iniquum."

And, in fact, this has been the doctrine, we may say, of all those
who have denied the existence of God.
Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Helvetius, Volney, and the whole
Voltairean tribe in France, have all substantially taken this view of
the question of morality; and Mill's opinion on the subject did not,
except in form, differ from theirs. His father was the friend of
Bentham, an advocate of the utilitarian theory of morality, which he
applied to civil and criminal law; and young Mill became an
enthusiastic disciple of the Benthamic philosophy.
"The principle of utility," he writes, "understood as Bentham
understood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it
through these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the
keystone which held together the detached and fragmentary
component parts of my knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my
conceptions of things. I now had opinions, a creed, a doctrine, a
philosophy; in one among the best senses of the word, a religion;
the inculcation and diffusion of which could be made the principal
outward purpose of a life."[257]
Bentham sought to save the ethics of utility by generalizing the
principle of self-interest into that of the greatest happiness; and it
was this "greatest-happiness principle" that gave Mill what he calls a
religion. Though less grovelling than the theory of self-interest, yet,
equally with it, it deprives morality of a solid foundation, substitutes
force for right, and consecrates all tyranny.
If there be no God, and interest is the sole criterion of what is good,
in the name of what am I commanded to sacrifice my particular
interest to general interest? If interest is the law, then my own
interest is the first and highest. If happiness be the supreme end of
life, and there be no life beyond this life, in order to ask of me the
sacrifice of my happiness, it must be called for in the name of some
other principle than happiness itself.
And if "the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the
suns,

"What is that to him that reaps not harvest of his youthful joys,
Tho' the deep heart of existence beat for ever like a boy's?"

Besides being false, this "greatest-happiness principle" is impossible

in practice. Who can tell what is for the greatest good of the
greatest number? It is very difficult, often impossible, when we
consider only our individual interest, to decide what actions will be
most conducive to our happiness, in the utilitarian sense of the
word. How, then, are we to decide when the interests of a whole
people, of humanity, and for all future time, are to be consulted?
Would any atheist of the school of Mill, who is not wholly fanatical,
dare affirm that the greatest number would be happier, even in a
low and animal sense, without faith in God and a future life? And
yet, according to his own theory, unless he is certain of this when he
attempts to destroy the religious belief of his fellow-beings, his act is
immoral.
Was it not in the name of, and in strict accordance with, the
principles of this theory that Comte planned what Mill calls "the
completest system of spiritual and temporal despotism which ever
yet emanated from a human brain, unless, possibly, that of Ignatius
Loyola—a system by which the yoke of general opinion, wielded by
an organized body of spiritual teachers and rulers, would be made
supreme over every action, and, as far as is in human possibility,
every thought of every member of the community, as well in the
things which regard only himself as in those which concern the
interests of others"?[258]
There is yet another vice in this system. If the good is the greatest
interest of the greatest number, then there are only public and social
ethics, and personal morality does not exist. Our duties are towards
others, and we have no duties towards ourselves. Thus the very
source of moral life is dried up.
Let us come to considerations less general and more immediately
connected with Mill's life.
Of his father's opinions on this subject he says: "In his views of life,
he partook of the character of the Stoic, the Epicurean, and the
Cynic, not in the modern but the ancient sense of the word. In his
personal qualities the Stoic predominated. His standard of morals
was Epicurean, inasmuch as it was utilitarian, taking as the exclusive
test of right and wrong the tendency of actions to produce pleasure
or pain. But he had (and this was the Cynic element) scarcely any
belief in pleasure, at least in his later years, of which alone, on this
point, I can speak confidently.... He thought human life a poor thing
at best after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had
gone by.... He would sometimes say that if life were made what it
might be by good government and good education, it would be
worth having; but he never spoke with anything like enthusiasm
even of that possibility."[259]
This certainly is a gloomy, not to say hopeless, view of life, and one
which, in spite of Mill's attempt to produce a contrary impression,
pervades the whole book. The thoughtful reader cannot help feeling
that Mill's state of mind was very like that described by the apostle:
"having no hope, and without God in the world." A deep and settled
dissatisfaction with all he saw around him, the feeling that all was
wrong—society, religion, government, the family, human life, the
philosophic opinions of the whole world except himself, together
with an undercurrent of despair, which made him doubt whether
they would ever be right, gave a coloring of melancholy to his
character which he is unable to hide. Life was no boon, and not even
the faintest ray of light pierced the black gloom of the grave.
Of his father he writes: "In ethics, his moral feelings were energetic
and rigid on all points which he deemed important to human well-
being, while he was supremely indifferent in opinion (though his
indifference did not show itself in personal conduct) to all those
doctrines of the common morality which he thought had no
foundation but in asceticism and priest-craft. He looked forward, for
example, to a considerable increase of freedom in the relations
between the sexes, though without pretending to define exactly
what would be, or ought to be, the precise conditions of that
freedom."[260]
Here we have an instance of the truth of the inference which we
have already drawn from the principles of the utilitarian ethics—that
they take no account of personal purity of character, and teach that
man's duties are towards others, and not towards himself. There is a
still more striking example of this in Mill's Autobiography.
He early in life made the acquaintance of a married lady, for whom
he conceived a very strong affection. He spent a good deal of his
time with her, and says: "I was greatly indebted to the strength of
character which enabled her to disregard the false interpretations
liable to be put on the frequency of my visits to her while living
generally apart from Mr. Taylor, and on our occasionally travelling
together"; though their relation at that time, he tells us, was only
that of strong affection and confidential intimacy. The reason which
he assigns for this is certainly most curious: "For though," he says,
"we did not consider the ordinances of society binding on a subject
so entirely personal, we did feel bound that our conduct should be
such as in no degree to bring discredit on her husband, nor
therefore on herself."[261]
In other words, Mill recognizes no obligation of personal purity, even
in the married, but holds that unchastity is wrong only when it
brings discredit on others; though he was unfaithful even to this
loose ethical code, since, according to his own account, his conduct
was such as to be liable to misinterpretation, and, therefore, such as
might bring disgrace upon the husband of the woman with whom he
was associating.
His hatred of marriage and of the restraints which it imposes is seen
in several parts of the work before us.
Of the Saint-Simonians he says: "I honored them most of all for
what they have been most cried down for—the boldness and
freedom from prejudice with which they treated the subject of the
family, the most important of any, and needing more fundamental
alterations than remain to be made in any other great social
institution, but on which scarcely any reformer has the courage to
touch. In proclaiming the perfect equality of men and women, and
an entirely new order of things in regard to their relations with one
another, the Saint-Simonians, in common with Owen and Fourier,
have entitled themselves to the grateful remembrance of future
generations."[262]
A man who puts himself forward as the advocate of free-love should
not, one would think, insist especially on the moralities, or give
himself prominence as a proof that belief in God is not useful either
to the individual or to society.
Mill's social ethics are of the same character. He is a socialist of the
most radical type, and considers the great problem of the future to
be how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action with a
common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal
participation of all in the benefits of combined labor; though the
"uncultivated herd who now compose the laboring masses," as well
as the mental and moral condition of the immense majority of their
employers, convince him that this social transformation is not now
either possible or desirable. Still, his ethics lead him to hope that
private property will be abolished, and that the whole earth will be
converted into a kind of industrial school, in which every man,
woman, and child will be required to do certain work, and receive in
remuneration whatever the controllers of the general capital may see
fit to give them. Thus, in the name of the greatest good of the
greatest number, personal purity, the family, private property,
society, are all to be no more, and the human race is to be managed
somewhat like a model stock-farm, in which everything, from
breeding down to the minutest details of food and exercise, is to be
under the control of a supervisory committee.
As we have already seen, Mill, after reading Bentham, got what he
called a religion: he had an object in life—to be a reformer of the
world.
This did very well for a time; but in the autumn of 1826, whilst, as
he expresses it, he was in a dull state of nerves, he awakened as
from a dream. He put the question to himself: "'Suppose that all
your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions
and opinions to which you are looking forward could be effected at
this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?'
And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!' At
this my heart sank within me; the whole foundation on which my life
was constructed fell down.... I seemed to have nothing left to live
for.
"At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself; but it did
not.... I carried it with me into all companies, into all occupations.
Hardly anything had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion
of it.... The lines in Coleridge's 'Dejection'—I was not then
acquainted with them—exactly describe my case:

"'A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,

A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.'"[263]

He now felt that his father had committed a blunder in the education
which he had given him; that the habit of analysis has a tendency to
wear away the feelings and dry up the fountains of pleasurable
emotions; that it is a perpetual worm at the root both of the
passions and of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermines all
desires and all pleasures which are the effects of association.
"My education, I thought, had failed to create these feelings in
sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while
the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made precocious
and premature analysis the inveterate habit of my mind. I was thus,
as I said to myself, left stranded at the commencement of my
voyage, with a well-equipped ship and a rudder, but no sail; without
any real desire for the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out
to work for; no delight in virtue or the general good, but also just as
little in anything else.... I frequently asked myself if I could, or if I
was bound to, go on living, when life must be passed in this manner.
I generally answered to myself that I did not think I could possibly
bear it beyond a year."[264]
This sad state of mind was the protest of the soul against the
skeleton of intellectual formulas into which it had been cramped. A
man is not going to live or die for conclusions, opinions, calculations,
analytical nothings. Man is not and cannot be made to be a mere
reasoning machine, a contrivance to grind out syllogisms. He is a
seeing, feeling, contemplating, believing, acting animal. We cannot
construct a philosophy of life upon abstract conclusions of the
analytical faculty; life is action and for action, and, if we insist on
analyzing and proving everything, we shall never come to action.
Humanity is a mere fiction of the mind, and can be nothing, whilst
God, to most men at least, is a living reality, to be believed in, hoped
in, loved. Were it possible for us to accept the doctrines of Stuart
Mill, we should feel the same interest in his humanitarian projects
that we do in Mr. Bergh's society for the prevention of cruelty to
animals. We pity the poor brutes, but we butcher them and eat them
all the same. If there is nothing but nature and nature's laws, it is
perfectly right that the few should live for the many, and that
thousands should sweat and groan to fill the belly of one animal who
is finer and stronger than those he feeds upon. Neither the law of
gravity, nor that of the conservation of forces, nor that which impels
bodies along the line of least resistance, nor that which causes the
fittest—which means the strongest—to survive, can impose upon us
a moral obligation not to do what we have the strength to do. These
infidels talk of the intellectual cowardice of those who believe. Let
them first be frank, and tell us, without circumlocution or
concealment, that there is nothing but force; that whatever is, must
be; and that nothing is either right or wrong. If we are permitted to
swallow oysters whole, to butcher oxen and imprison monkeys in
mere wantonness; and if these are our forefathers, why may not the
strong and intelligent members of the human race put the weak and
ignorant to any use they may see fit; or why may we not imitate the
more natural savage who roasts or boils his man as his civilized
brother would a pig?
It is easy to make a show of despising the argument implied in this
question; but, admitting the atheistic evolutionary hypothesis, it
cannot be answered.
Cannibals hold that it is for the greatest happiness of the greatest
number that their enemies should be eaten; and, after all, what is
happiness, in the utilitarian and animal sense, but an affair of taste,
to a great extent even of imagination? Have not slave-owners in all
times held that it was for the greatest good of the greatest number
that slavery should continue to exist? Or has the greatest-happiness
principle had anything to do with the abolition of slavery among the
Christian nations or elsewhere?
Men appealed in the name of right, of justice, of the inborn dignity
of the human soul, of God-given liberty, and the conscience of the
nations was awakened. They gave no thought to the idle theories of
brains, from which the heart and soul had been strained, about a
greatest-happiness principle. What have atheists ever done but talk,
and mock, and criticise, and seek their own ease whilst discoursing
on the general good?
Mill takes the greatest care to record, in more than one place, that
he and his father occasionally wrote articles for the Westminster
Review without receiving pay for them; thinking it, evidently, worthy
of remark that an atheist should even write except for money. Here
we may note a vice inherent in atheism, which proves at once its
untruth and its impotence. It leaves man without enthusiasm,
without hope, without love, to fall back upon himself, a wilted,
shrunken thing, to mix with matter, or to vanish in lifeless, logical
formalism. It has no heroes, no saints, no martyrs, no confessors.
Its advocates either abandon themselves to lust and the senses, or,
making a divinity of their own imagined superiority, worship the
ghost they have conjured up, whilst looking down upon the rest of
mankind as a vulgar herd still intellectually walking on four feet. Mill
makes no effort to conceal his contempt for the mass of mankind;
and contempt does not inspire love, which alone renders man helpful
to man.
The gloom which settled around the life of John Stuart Mill, when he
once fully realized that, holding the intellectual opinions which he
held, nothing was worth living for, and that he was consequently left
without a motive or an object in life, never really left him. He tells
us, indeed, that the cloud gradually drew off, and that, though he
had several relapses which lasted many months, he was never as
miserable as he had been; but it is quite evident, from the whole
tone of this Autobiography, that his disappointed soul, like the
wounded dove, drew the wings that were intended to lift it to God
close to itself, and, hopeless, sank into philosophical despair.
Happiness he considered the sole end of life; and yet he says that
the enjoyments of life, which alone make it worth having, when
made its principal object, pall upon us and sicken the heart. "Ask
yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only
chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the
purpose of life."
In other words, in Mill's philosophy, the end of life is happiness,
which can be possessed only by those who persuade themselves
that this is not the end of life. The doctrine of philosophical
necessity, during the later returns of his despondency, weighed upon
him like an incubus: "I felt as if I was scientifically proved to be the
helpless slave of antecedent circumstances; as if my character and
that of all others had been formed for us by agencies beyond our
control, and was wholly out of our own power. I often said to myself,
What a relief it would be if I could disbelieve the doctrine of the
formation of character by circumstances!"[265]
He tries to escape from the fatal web in which his soul hung
helpless; but sophisms and quibbles of the brain cannot minister to a
mind diseased or pluck sorrow from the heart.
But the saddest part of Mill's Autobiography is the portion devoted to
the woman whose friendship he called the honor and chief blessing
of his existence. The picture which he has drawn of his childhood is
at once painful and ludicrous.
He does not even incidentally allude to a single fact which would
lead one to suppose that he had a mother or had ever known a
mother's love.
The father, as described by the son, was cold, fanatical, morose,
almost inhuman, acting as though he thought children are born
merely for the purpose of being crammed with Greek roots and
logical formulas. John Stuart was put at Greek vocables when only
three years old. His father demanded of him not only the utmost
that he could do, but much that it was utterly impossible that he
should do. He was guilty, for instance, of the incredible folly of
making him read the Dialogues of Plato when only seven years old.
He never knew anything of the freshness or joyousness of childhood,
or what it is to be "boy eternal." He grew up without the
companionship of children, blighted and dwarfed by the abiding
presence of the narrow and unnatural man who nipped the flower of
his life in the bud, and repressed within him all the sentiments and
aspirations which are the spontaneous and healthful product of
youth. He was not taught to delight in sunshine and flowers, and
music and song; but even in his boyish rambles there strode ever by
his side the analytical machine, dissecting, destroying, marring God's
work with his lifeless, hopeless theories. The effect of this training
was, as we have already seen, that when the boy became a man, he
found himself like a ship on the ocean without sail or compass, and
there gathered around his life the settled gloom of despair, which his
philosophical opinions tended only to deepen.
Without a mother's love, without a father whom it was possible to
love, without friends of his own age, without God, dejected,
despondent, hopeless, he met the wife of a friend of his father, who,
from the manner in which she controlled her first and second
husbands, must have been a clever woman, and he became an
idolater, giving to her the adoration which his father had taught him
to withhold from God. That there is no exaggeration in this
statement every one who will take the trouble to read the seventh
chapter of Mill's Autobiography will be ready to confess.
He married this woman in 1851, when he was forty-five and she but
two years younger, and seven years later her death occurred. Mill
wishes the world to believe that this woman was the prodigy of the
XIXth century, surpassing in intellectual vigor and moral strength all
men and all other women; that to her he owed all that is best in his
own writings; and that he is but the interpreter of the wonderful
thoughts of this incomparable woman, whom others have deemed
merely a commonplace woman's rights woman.
"Thus prepared," he writes, "it will easily be believed that when I
came into close intellectual communion with a person of the most
eminent faculties, whose genius, as it grew and unfolded itself in
thought, struck out truths far in advance of me, but in which I could
not, as I had done in those others, detect any mixture of error, the
greatest part of my mental growth consisted in the assimilation of
those truths; and the most valuable part of my intellectual work was
in building the bridges and clearing the paths which connected them
with my general system of thought."[266]
Mill seems to have been incapable of a healthful sentiment of any
kind. The same quality in his stunted and warped moral nature
which caused him to have a false and exaggerated sense of the evil
that is in the world, leading him to atheism, made him a blind and
superstitious worshipper of the imaginary endowments of his wife.
But one must read the book itself to realize how far he carried this
idolatry.
When she dies, he again sinks into the gloom which his superstition
had seemed to cause him partially to forget; and if he continues to
work, it is only with the feeble strength "derived from thoughts of
her and communion with her memory." Her death was a calamity
which took from him all hope, and he found some slight alleviation
only in the mode of life which best enabled him to feel her still near
him.
She died at Avignon, and he bought a cottage as close as possible to
the place where she was buried; and there he settled down in
helpless misery, feeling that all that remained to him in the world
was a memory.
"Her memory," he writes, "is to me a religion, and her approbation
the standard by which, summing up, as it does, all worthiness, I
endeavor to regulate my life."[267]
He did not believe in God, in the soul, in a life beyond life; he had
scarcely any faith in the practical efforts of the age to improve the
condition of the masses, upon whom he looked as the common
herd; his own countrymen especially he despised as selfish and
narrow above all other men, grovelling in their instincts, and low in
the objects which they aim at; happiness he held to be the sole end
of existence; and at the close of his life, an old man, in a foreign
land, in immedicable misery, he stood beside a grave, and sought
with feeble fingers to clutch the shadow of a dream, which he called
his religion; and so he died.
We have never read a sadder book, nor one which to our mind
contains stronger proof that the soul longs with an infinite craving
for God, and, not finding him, will worship anything—a woman, a
stone, a memory.

FOOTNOTES:
[249] Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1874, by Rev. I. T. Hecker,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C.
[250] Autobiography. By John Stuart Mill. New York: Holt & Co. 1873.
[251] P. 41.
[252] P. 43.
[253] P. 44.
[254] P. 46.
[255] Apologia, p. 268.
[256] P. 70.
[257] P. 67.
[258] P. 213.
[259] P. 48.
[260] P. 107.
[261] P. 230.
[262] P. 167.
[263] P. 134.
[264] P. 140.
[265] P. 169.
[266] P. 243.
[267] P. 251.
 THE FARM OF MUICERON.
BY MARIE RHEIL.
FROM THE REVUE DU MONDE CATHOLIQUE.

XVI.

However, our good friends at Muiceron had not become, believe me,
so entirely perverted by vanity as to lose all remembrance of the
past. They could not have lived twenty years with a boy as perfect in
conduct and affection as Jean-Louis without missing him as the days
rolled on.
I acknowledge, nevertheless, that the first week passed so quickly in
the midst of the flurry and fuss of the marriage contract and
presents—bought on credit—that the absence of the good child was
scarcely felt; but, towards the end of the second week, one evening
Pierrette asked Ragaud if the time had not nearly expired that Jean-
Louis had been lent to Michou for the clearing of the forest of
Montreux; "for," said she, "I cannot live any longer without him, he
was of so much use to me, and the house is so empty without him."
"I gave him for a fortnight," replied Ragaud, "and I would not
disoblige Michou by reclaiming him before; but I think we will see
him next week, and then I hope he will be over his little miff."
"What miff?" asked Pierrette.
"Bless me! wife, you are a little too simple if you have not noticed
long before this how sullen the boy has become."
"He never says much," replied Pierrette, "and we have all been so
very busy lately, it has made him more silent even than usual."
"That is precisely it," said Ragaud. "You have petted him so much,
he fancied everything was his; and when he saw us so occupied with
Jeannette's marriage, he took it in dudgeon, and became offended."
"That would be very wrong in him," replied La Ragaude, "and I don't
believe Jeannet capable of such wicked sentiments. Jealousy is not
one of his faults; on the contrary, he always thinks of others before
himself."
"That may be, that may be, but you cannot judge of wine, no matter
how old you may know it to be, before tasting; and, in the same
way, you cannot answer for any quality of the heart until it has been
tried. So it was very easy for Jeannet not to be jealous when there
was no subject for jealousy; but, if you were not always blind and
deaf to his defects, you would acknowledge that from the day that
Isidore put his foot in this house he has changed as much as milk
turned into curds."
"That may all be," said Pierrette, who could not answer her
husband's objections.
"That may all be so easily that it is positively so," replied Ragaud,
"and Jeannet will not re-enter this house until I have spoken very
plainly to him, and made him promise to treat Isidore as a brother."
"That is just what I think," replied good Pierrette, who loved peace
above all things, "and you always speak wisely."
Jeannette, for her part, had a little secret annoyance that she
carefully concealed, but which made her more irritable and less
docile than usual, greatly to the astonishment of Pierrette, who
thought her to be at the summit of happiness. After being rather
sullen with Jeannet, because he did not appear delighted with her
marriage, and, above all, with her intended, she was now displeased
to see Isidore parading before every one—and to her the first—his
great satisfaction at the departure of Jean-Louis. He even seemed to
seek every occasion to speak injuriously of him before her parents,
and allowed no one to praise him in his presence. The child was not
very patient, we already know, and, as Solange truly said, her head
alone was dazzled; her heart was not spoiled enough to make her
lose her good sense. Still further, she began to feel very uneasy on a
subject which she wished to understand clearly before finally
engaging herself—it was that of religion. She had felt the ground
around Perdreau, and, although he was as hypocritical as the devil,
he had attempted several very disagreeable jokes about the church
and her ceremonies which, I must say, provoked Jeannette to such a
degree, she openly showed her displeasure. Thereupon Isidore,
seeing that he had gone too far, and that he must be more careful or
he would lose her dowry, tried to play the part of a saint in his
niche; but it was a comedy in which he was not well skilled from
want of practice, and Jeannette, more and more worried and
unhappy, commenced to regret that the good and wise Jeannet was
no longer at her side to aid her with his advice, of which she had
never before felt such urgent need.
So she, in her turn, hazarded the same request as Pierrette, and
asked her father when they might expect the return of Jean-Louis.
Ragaud made her nearly the same reply as he had done to his wife,
without mentioning his ideas in relation to Jeannet's supposed
jealousy; and Jeannette patiently awaited him.
But the fortnight went by without any sign of the boy, and it could
be easily perceived that Jeannette was becoming nervous—a kind of
sickness little known in the country even by name, but which
mademoiselle's example had taught Jeannette to attempt whenever
things did not go on exactly as she wished. However, affairs went on
precisely as those rascally Perdreaux desired. The marriage-contract
was prepared, and, after an immense scrawl of big words, which
Ragaud did not understand, it concluded by making the good man
abandon all his personal and landed property to his daughter, only
reserving for himself a moderate annuity. Ragaud was ashamed to
avow that all this waste paper was entirely above his
comprehension. He tried to look very wise, but proved by his
questions that he was caught in a trap; for, after the reading of the
knavish document, which stripped him of everything, he innocently
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